Nothing ruins a hamburger like a giant slab of raw onion. My dad used to prefer just onions and mayo on his burgers. I can’t even wrap my head around that. You may as well soak the buns in turpentine for what giant slabs of pungent root vegetables do to the flavor profile. Seriously, blech.
But… cook them down a bit… grill ’em, break ’em down with salt and fat and time… that’s another story. These once offensive abominations become a whole different thing. They can propel one’s taste buds to extraordinary heights. They become, to put it in gastronomic terms, fucking delicious.
And, still — some people don’t like them. Some people will still not even try them — most likely because at some point someone pinched their nose and made them take down a sliver of raw hell. A move that will not only obliterate the tongue for a solid two days, but create indefensible trauma. I know someone who once mistook chunks of onion for chunks of an apple. As the story goes, his reckless monster of a grandmother was cutting onions next to a beautiful, intact apple. How brazen can one human being be?
The result, I am told, is a never-ending curse of death to anyone who offers them an onion. And, why not. Fuck. I would have probably cut my tongue out.
But they can be delicious. They really can. And I truly believe that, if given a chance, we can and SHOULD attempt to gently support their detractors into giving them another chance. Because every “I fucking hate onions” is an opportunity to change a life.
I guess I just mean that, for those of us who like onions — who have experienced their very real place in our culinary bliss — we really do no favors to our pungent little friends by taking an exclusionary attitude. “These are the onions. They are what they fucking are. Deal with it.” Well, that’s just rude. We robbed that onion of a chance.
I have been described as an onion.
I like to think — I mean, at least I hope — this isn’t a commentary on my natural essence. But, to be fair, I routinely forget to use deodorant — so… who can say? But yeah — an onion I have been called. The nuance of layers, or so it’s been told to me.
I find great worry here, though. I mean, peel away the layer of an onion, the next layer is still onion-y. They don’t start tasting like buttered toast the farther you go — it’s just more onion. So I tend to eschew this particular characterization.
Instead, I like to think that, if I am an onion, it’s because to really appreciate it, there is some work to be done. Questions to cut down to manageable size? Understanding my trauma is the heat, maybe. Recognizing that I have anxieties, and probably am just freaking out about whether or not you like me or not — that’s the salt, maybe.
But with time, maybe you’d grow to like me. Or if not, maybe you’d grow to appreciate my place in the dish.
There are reasons, down inside me, like a bowl of tangled screws, why I don’t push myself on people. But some onions do. Some onions attempt to blast off a giant chunk of their offensive nature right into the sharpest part of a person’s senses — like, take it or leave it. “I am an onion, bitch. Down the hatch!”
This is not the way.
I work with a lot of onions in my teaching. Not human onions. But philosophical onions. Ideological onions.
Some of these onions (not an exhaustive list) include:
Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Gender Issues, School Inequity, Bias, White Privilege and Colonial Pedagogy… et al.
These are onions. If I were just lop off a bite-size chunk of one of these, and try to get it down your gullet, you’re not only going to hate that experience, but you will report to dislike the onion forever and beyond.
Maybe it comes down to use. To really use an onion, you have to develop some appreciation for it. You have to take the time to say, taste this. Did you like it? No? How about this? You don’t like grilled onions, you say? Here’s a nice onion and bacon jam. Like this one? No? Here’s a delicious onion ring. Here’s a fried onion. Here’s a goddam Funyun… I’m going to find something. Stick with me.
But we don’t do that, do we? We say, this is the onion. It doesn’t need you to like it. It exists whether you like it or not.
And for some people, it’s much more urgent. As a white guy, I don’t necessarily need you to like the onion. I don’t even really need you to accept the existence of the onion. But some people do. Some people die because the onion is not acknowledged — and the fault of that rests squarely on anyone who simply peels the onion (the bare minimum, right) and weaponizes it. Says that you either acknowledge this as the definitive version of the onion, or you are clearly an onion murderer.
Consider an onion like “Defund the police.” This onion isn’t going to hit every taste bud the same way. We may have to carefully work with this onion — to make it palatable. And, if you have the space and privilege to do that, then you should. You should cook the goddamn onion. And you should explore the idea that maybe YOU just don’t have the right fucking recipe. Maybe you could put aside your goddamn culinary ego, a la onions, for long enough to find something that works. I once ate, honest to god, a scoop of garlic ice cream. I would have never in a million years thought to do that — but it was pretty delightful. My tongue did backflips. If I limited myself to the boundaries of my knowledge, I would have been denied that experience.
The same could be true with onions. The right recipe is out there — but people have a finite tolerance.
And sure, sometimes, the only way is just a big ol’ stinky bite of onion. But let’s keep that as a last resort.
